The present invention relates to a manifold unit for a two component dispensing gun.
These days two-component cartridges are often used for the dispensing of two-component materials such as adhesives. By virtue of their dimensions, they provide the right mixing ratio of the two components; and through a connected static mixer nozzle homogeneity of the substance is achieved. By using these two-component cartridges, together with specially designed dispensing guns, which may be manually or pneumatically driven, ready-to-use adhesive can be applied from the mixer nozzle.
The disadvantage of the two-component cartridge systems is that the cartridges, once emptied, have a relatively high waste volume and weight. This is not in line with the increasing ecological awareness in both legislation and consumer behaviour.
One way to enjoy the advantages of ready-to-use adhesive, achieved by using the two-component cartridge systems, while at the same time creating less waste is the concept of using sausage packs. In these, each component is packed in a single sausage. For dispensing these two-component sausage packs, special dispensing guns are already available on the market. They are manually or pneumatically driven. Unfortunately these existing two-component sausage guns have some tremendous disadvantages regarding their user-friendliness. Very often, reactive two-component materials are packed in the sausages. With these materials, skin contact should be avoided. As a result, the smeary handling, especially when removing the emptied sausage packs from the guns is a major difficulty. Furthermore, parts of these guns, especially the front-manifold to the mixer is contaminated with both material components. Material contamination can also occur on the inside walls of the sausage cylinder of the gun. If the A and B components of the guns are mistakenly interchanged on re-loading, i.e. putting the A-contaminated frontend side onto a B-sausage, functional problems can occur with these sausage guns and the mixed materials through an unintentional reaction of both material components. Moreover, it is not possible to use these guns for different types of materials without first cleaning them, an effort which diminishes the user' productivity.
We have now developed a disposable manifold unit (front end) for dispensing guns which overcomes these disadvantages.